Collateral Beauty: the perfect movie to watch with loved ones

Cuddle up: Collateral Beauty is ideal for settling down to watch with a loved oneCredit:
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29 September 2017 • 1:30pm

Will Smith’s modern-day fable, Collateral Beauty, is the perfect movie to watch with your loved ones, and digitally downloading it to own forever couldn’t be easier

Just three weeks after taking the role of grieving father Howard Inlet in Collateral Beauty, Will Smith got some tragic news of his own. His father, a former member of the US Air Force, Willard Smith Snr, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

It was, of course, shattering news. But in preparing for the film, with its themes of grief and recovery, the imminent loss of his father caused him to grow closer to him in ways Smith hadn’t expected, and to have conversations that otherwise might never have happened.

“Having to face my father's impending death while working on the struggles of my character helped us to connect,” Smith told the Telegraph. “I wasn’t scared to ask any questions, and he was responding, and we were able to talk about the difficulty and the pain and the fear. So it was a beautiful way to prepare for a movie and an even more majestic way to say goodbye to my father.”

Connecting and talking with your loved ones is Collateral Beauty’s main theme. Owing a lot to timeless classics such as It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, but set in a beautifully shot contemporary New York, it has Smith as high-flying advertising executive Inlet, who appears to have the world at his feet, until unimaginable tragedy strikes in the shape of the death of his six year-old daughter from cancer.

Retreating from life, his formerly thriving business and his friends, he begins to write letters to the universe, in the forms of Love, Time and Death, in an effort to make sense of the terrible blow life has dealt him.

Just three weeks after taking the role of grieving father Howard Inlet in Collateral Beauty, Will Smith got some tragic news of his own

But suddenly the abstract concepts Inlet has been mailing his questions to start to pop up in human form, and begin the task of showing him the “collateral beauty” of the hand that life has dealt him. Keira Knightley appears as Love, newcomer Jacob Latimore is Time while Death manifests itself in the unexpected form of a surprisingly twinkly Dame Helen Mirren.

“There’s always collateral beauty in any situation,” Smith explained of the movie’s central theme. “However dark and difficult things are, collateral beauty is the light that shows you the way out. No matter how bad a situation is, as a universal law beauty is connected to it. I love that concept as a basis for dealing with pain and suffering.”

Smith’s supporting cast is absolutely stellar. Alongside Mirren and Knightley are Edward Norton and Kate Winslet, who play Howard’s friends, who worry both for him and for the business he is allowing to fall into ruin.

When it was released last Christmas, Collateral Beauty won a coveted A- from CinemaScore, which polls paying cinemagoers after they’ve seen the movie, so it’s well worth a look. And it’s a perfect film to digitally download and talk about with the special people in your life.